My first memory of the accordion is seeing one on television when I was 5
years old. In the early '50's, the accordion was incredibly popular,
reflected by the television success of Dick Contino on The Horace Heidt
Show and the Ted Mack Amateur Hour, and the weekly Lawrence Welk
broadcasts. I coaxed my dad into buying me my first instrument, a 12-bass
accordion. My first teacher was Joe Macko, who came to our house to
teach. I remember learning In a Little Spanish Town, along with
other popular standards.

After my parents got divorced in the early 50's, I moved to western
Pennsylvania, to be raised by my aunt and uncle. Purely by chance, they
found me one of the best accordion teachers in the country, Walter
Grabowski, an intelligent, well-read man whose bookshelves were lined with
volumes of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Bertrand Russell. He told me he
memorized Beethoven symphonies by playing recordings of them in his
bedroom while he slept.

From the beginning, my training with Grabowski was both high-brow and
low-brow: I was learning transcriptions of opera overtures, piano and
violin concerti, and solo piano pieces; but I was also playing novelty
pieces like Dizzy Fingers, Flight of the Bumble Bee and Carnival of
Venice; and polkas and waltzes by Frank Yankovic, the hero of my
Slovenian-American community. Grabowski stressed musicianship above all
else: he could abide the occasional wrong note, but was unforgiving when
I failed to honor the composer's intentions with regards to expression.
He also gave me a solid grounding in harmony: by the time I was 16, I
knew all the major, minor, seventh and diminished chords by memory.

In the early 1960's, Grabowski introduced me to pieces by Paul Creston,
Nicolas Flagello, Alexander Tcherepnin, Elie Siegmeister and Henry Cowell,
which had been commissioned by the American Accordionists' Association.
These pieces were written expressly for the accordion and they instantly
felt and sounded natural on my instrument. And I was young enough to be
open to the new vocabulary which these composers used.

During all my excitement over original accordion compositions, I was still
playing pop music, too. I had a band called "The Fascinations," made up
of accordion, tenor saxophone, guitar and drums, which played for
weddings, parties, club dates and dances. We had no singer, so we covered
a lot of tunes by my favorite instrumental band, the Ventures --Telstar
and Walk, Don't Run; along with instrumental versions of The Lion Sleeps
Tonight and When I Fall in Love; and Slovenian-American polkas and
waltzes. I was transcribing tunes from the radio and records and began
writing my own polkas, which became my introduction to the world of
composition.

In 1967, Grabowski introduced me to the "free bass" accordion. Up until
that time, I was playing a standard, or "stradella bass," accordion, on
which the left hand buttons contained 2 rows of bass notes and 4 rows of
pre-set chords--you could push one button and get a 3-note chord. The
free bass accordion had a left hand system with all single tones and a
range of over 4 octaves. With this instrument, I was able to play Bach
and Scarlatti pieces directly from the keyboard manuscripts, with no
transcription involved. And modern composers were using the left-hand
buttonboard of the free bass as an equal melodic partner to the right-hand
keyboard.

I spent the years 1965-72 studying music at several colleges,
universities, and conservatories. Because the accordion is not accepted
as a classical instrument in most universities in the United States, I
majored in music theory and composition and got heavily involved in
electronic music. Although I don't use electronics in my works now,
working with electronic music for 3 years stressed to me the importance of
timbre as a primary musical element and developed in me a love of
drones.

The recordings I heard in college that I listened to the most were of
works by Xenakis, Penderecki, Ligeti, Partch, Nancarrow and Feldman; but
it was not until Morton Subotnick introduced me to Terry Riley's
Rainbow in Curved Air and Steve Reich's Come Out that I
realized I wanted to be a composer, not just a performer. The Reich
piece, especially, made a huge impact on me: I was amazed and inspired by
the idea that a composer could take a single, spoken phrase and make an
entire 15-minute composition out of it without introducing any new
material.

I began, in 1971, writing solo accordion pieces in which subtle harmonic
shifts took place over long periods of time and in which tones would
slowly cross-fade between the left- and right-hand keyboards. Often times
I used analog or digital delays to cover the changes of bellows, thus
providing a continuum. The only piece which has survived from this time
is Toronto: Sevenths (1972), for one or more accordions.

From 1972-75, I taught part-time at the Acme Accordion School in Westmont,
New Jersey. The director of the school, Stanley Darrow, introduced me to
the European avant-garde literature for accordion, through the scores of
Per Norgaard, Arne Nordheim, Ole Schmidt, Torbjorn Lundquist, et.al., and
the recordings of Mogens Ellegaard and Hugo Noth. It was from studying
these scores and hearing these recordings that I learned about extended
techniques for the accordion, which I incorporated into my composing and
performing vocabulary.

In 1977, I began working with the Philadelphia-based ensemble, Relache, as
performer, composer and music advisor. We specialized in what I call
"performer choice" pieces--compositions for classically- trained
performers in which all-or-part of the material for the piece is provided,
but a good deal of decision-making is left up to the performers. A good
example is Terry Riley's In C (1964), containing 53 melodic
patterns which all the performers play in sequence, with each performer
deciding independently how long to spend on each pattern, resulting in an
infinite variety of phase-shifting. We created a repertoire of these
kinds of pieces by collaborating with Pauline Oliveros, Malcolm Goldstein,
Daniel Goode, Joseph Kasinskas, Thomas Albert and Mary Jane Leach. This
was a very exciting process: we were creating a new kind of improvisation
designed for performers who were not improvisers in the traditional sense.
I composed The Flying Pipe Organ of Xian (1985) for Relache using
this technique.

In 1984, I heard John Zorn for the first time at New Music
America/Hartford, performing his game piece, Rugby. This performance
challenged every idea I ever had about ensemble playing: here was a
situation where every decision in the piece was being made by the
performers, guided by a set of instructions provided by Zorn. I was so
excited by what I heard and saw that I ran up to Zorn on stage, introduced
myself, and told him if he ever needed an accordion player in a future
project, I wanted to do it.

The next year, Zorn took me up on my offer by inviting me to join the
Cobra big band. With Cobra, Zorn was able to do for the '80's what In C
did for the 60's: create a classic piece for open instrumentation for
performers who wanted to be part of the creative process of realizing a
piece. Cobra codifies just about every aspect of free improvisation:
instructions are provided which enable individual ensemble members to
determine orchestration, dynamics, density, types of material, endings,
even the ability to call back events which happened earlier in the
performance ("memory systems"). And, in a quintessentially American move,
Zorn provides "guerrilla systems" for those independents who don't like
taking instructions from anyone.

The Cobra band was made-up of people whom I was meeting for the first
time: Elliott Sharp, Bill Frisell, Bobby Previte, Wayne Horvitz, Zeena
Parkins, Carol Emanuel, Arto Lindsay, Christian Marclay, and Anthony
Coleman. I had no contact whatsoever with the free improv scene before,
but I have since collaborated on numerous projects with many of these same
people.

During the tour of Cobra, I asked Zorn about the possibility of writing me
a solo accordion piece. He said that he had never written a piece in
which he did not perform himself, but would be glad to give it a try. The
result was Road Runner, which he finished in January of 1986, and
which we first realized as a recording project for my cassette-only
release, Blue Window (zOaR, out-of-print, reissued on Manhattan Cascade,
CRI).

I was so encouraged by the results of the Road Runner experience that I
continued commissioning solo accordion pieces from Lois V Vierk, Mary
Ellen Childs, Anthony Coleman, John King, Aaron Jay Kernis, Stephen
Montague, Somei Satoh, William Duckworth and Alvin Lucier. There seemed
to be a healthy, nurturing balance between my own composing and performing
pieces by my colleagues.

My own music took an abrupt shift after meeting Zorn: up until 1985, my
pieces were definitely out of the minimalist mold, concentrating on
limited material which I would put under an intense musical microscope.
My first solo piece after working with Zorn was Scenes from a Mirage
(1985), a set of variations on a theme which sounds vaguely ethnic. I
put the theme through the stylistic ringer, with references to flamenco
guitar, Tex-Mex accordion, Balkan bands and Henry Cowell-like tone
clusters. This was the first time since high school that I drew on
popular music and the first piece I ever wrote using more than one genre.
Although the piece sounds nothing like Zorn, its episodic structure and
mixture of popular music sources with art music techniques came directly
out of my experiences with Cobra and Road Runner.

Also in the mid '80's, I was invited to compose my first score for modern
dance. I continued drawing on forms from popular music for this project,
Waiting Room. I wrote a march based on a traditional Shaker melody; a
cover version of Sentimental Journey, which I had Bill Frisell play over a
drone; a middle-eastern-sounding tune called Fez Up; a jazzy,
chromatic piece in 11/4, Urban Rite; and my first polka in 20 years,
The Grass, It Is Blue (Ain't Nothin' But a Polka).

The Grass, It Is Blue gave me the idea for my next project. My
thought was, if I can write a polka without giving up my avant-garde
credentials, why don't I ask other composers to try to do the same? I
invited composers from a broad cross-section of the alternative music
scene: free improv--Fred Frith, Elliott Sharp, Tom Cora, Christian
Marclay, John King, Nicolas Collins, Anthony Coleman; new classical
music--William Duckworth, Carl Stone, Thomas Albert, Peter Zummo, Mary
Jane Leach, Rolf Groesbeck, Aaron Jay Kernis, David Mahler, Joseph
Kasinskas, Peter Garland, Daniel Goode, Guy De Bievre, Mary Ellen Childs,
Lois V Vierk, Bill Ruyle; jazz, pop, rock--Bobby Previte, Carl Finch,
David Garland, Robin Holcomb, William Obrecht, Steve Elson, Phillip
Johnston. I gave the composers only the following criteria: try to write
a piece under 3 minutes that can be played either solo or with a band.
The result was a collection I call POLKA FROM THE FRINGE.

I have spent most of my creative life since 1985 writing music for
dancers. There are so many things I like about writing for dance: the
act of collaboration with someone outside your own discipline can create
naive, outrageous, impractical demands--leading to improbable, surreal and
inspired solutions; dance seasons are 3-6 days long, so you get to
perform the pieces several times over a short period, polishing and
refining the composition and performance; the audience is broader, less
specialized, but at the same time more exposed and friendly to new music
than concert music audiences. I have now written about 20 pieces for
dance and it continues to be one of my favorite and most fulfilling
activities.

For a 1992 dance project called Passage North, I put together an acoustic
band of accordion, violin, cello and bass. I recently recorded the
material and was so taken by the sound of that ensemble that I have
decided to make it a working band. I'm now writing and arranging material
for the group, to be called the Bantam Orchestra, and intend to tour and
record with that combination for the next few years.

The most amazing thing about being an accordionist for 40 years has been
to experience the dramatic shifts in public opinion about the instrument.
As I said, I began playing in 1952, when the accordion was the most
popular instrument in America. By the late 50's, however, the guitar had
replaced the accordion in popularity: kids watching television at that
time were more likely to see Elvis Presley playing guitar than Dick
Contino playing accordion. During the 60's and 70's the accordion was
decidedly and totally out-of-fashion. Not only were fewer people playing
it, but the future of the instrument seemed relegated to camp and
nostalgia.

But by the late '80's, low-and-behold, the explosion in world music
brought the accordion back into vogue again--you could now see accordions
not only in bands from Texas, Louisiana, Brazil, Argentina, Colombia,
Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, South Africa and Madagascar--but in
pop culture again, with Paul Simon, John Cougar Mellencamp, Los Lobos, Ry
Cooder and Tom Waits. Now in the '90's, the accordion shows up frequently
in television commercials, the ultimate capitalist compliment.

I've continued playing the accordion through all these attitude
adjustments. People often ask me why. I used to explain that I made the
choice when I was a 5-year-old, but that always made it sound like, had I
been a sensible adult instead, I would have known better. Would I have
made the decision knowing the negative image that came with the
instrument? I don't know. I'm just thankful that I made the choice at an
age when we act first and foremost on our instincts.

In 1988, I was asked to perform on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood, a
long-running, children's television show. The producers explained to me
that they wanted to show children that the accordion could be used as a
classical instrument. For me, it was like coming full-circle. Now I had
a chance to play accordion on television and just maybe there would be one
child out there watching for whom the accordion would spark an interest,
and perhaps even a life, in music.